Daughter of the Revolution: An Interview with Dina Nayeri, Author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea

At the outset of Dina Nayeri’s ambitious and richly layered debut novel, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea (Riverhead), eleven year old Saba lives in a village in Northern Iran with her father. It’s 1981, shortly after the revolution, and her mother and twin sister, Mahtab, have just emigrated to the United States—or so Saba explains their sudden disappearance to herself. As the years pass and no letters from them arrive, she begins telling her friends stories about her sister’s American life, drawing from old magazines and contraband TV shows and movies—Taxi, M*A*S*H, Love Story—with amusing results. But as the gap between Saba’s increasingly constrained life and the one she imagines for her Western twin widens, her illusions shatter, and she begins to write her own fate. Nayeri unflinchingly evokes the compromises of a young woman monitored by mullahs and gossipy neighbors, but she doesn’t neglect the universal comedy of growing up. Vogue caught up with Nayeri to find out what inspired the novel—and to discuss her own very real American story.

You were born in Tehran and moved to the United States with your family when you were ten. Was writing Saba a way of imagining what might have been if you hadn’t left Iran? That’s exactly the question that sparked the idea. In the summer of 2007, I was traveling in Greece, visiting many small villages that reminded me of my favorite ones in Iran. I would watch the women my age, how they lived and what was important to them, their joys and their worries. It triggered a nagging thought: What if I was still in Iran? What would life be like? It was also a natural moment of reflection for me because I was leaving America, my adopted home, and moving to France, again experiencing what it’s like to be an immigrant and an outsider, and questioning where my true home was. So I dreamed up the story of two sisters who had been separated after the revolution and I gave each of them one of my two possible lives—the one I lived and the one I might have lived.

In Saba’s vision of her twin Mahtab’s American life, everyone eats hamburgers and wears cowboy hats and dreams of going to Harvard. What surprised you most about America and Americans when you first arrived in Oklahoma?Well, I did realize quickly that all my notions of America were clichéd and that people are as varied and complex everywhere as they are in Iran. Americans had so many delightful quirks that I grew to love: the Jell-O salads and the five-minute hugs and the diving competitions in the sweltering Oklahoma summer. Thanksgiving was a marvel, as was the Fourth of July and the intensity of high-school football games. And the first time I tasted a taco or iced tea, or the first time I sat on the hood of a car in a parking lot drinking slushies with my friends, I felt almost—almost—completely American.

But my arrival wasn’t a pleasant one. Nineties Oklahoma wasn’t the most diverse place, and the first Gulf War had just happened. It was a hostile time to be arriving from Iran with a thick accent and awkward immigrant clothes, having never heard their music or watched their favorite TV shows, having no clue why everything about me was offensive. By high school, my peers were growing up, becoming more mature and tolerant of each other.

In imagining her sister’s life at Harvard, Saba conjures some pretty cringe-worthy scenarios—her roommates make assumptions about her religion, and her boyfriend’s mother won’t stop talking about her passion for Persian rugs and cats. Knowing that you’ve spent a fair amount of time in the Ivy League, how accurate is Saba?Well, as you say, those scenes are meant to be Western caricatures created by an Iranian girl who has only ever seen Americans on television. So she’s not very accurate. When I arrived at Princeton at eighteen, I found the most culturally diverse, the most accepting, and incredibly humbling group of people I’ve ever met in my life. My friends were from India and Maryland, Greece and Alaska, France and Pakistan and Japan and South Africa and so many other places. My college boyfriend had five passports and spoke three languages and knew more about Iranian history than I did. His father gave me my first copy of Khayyam’s Rubáiyát, a gift that I still treasure and read often.

In fact, you have a business degree from Harvard. What led you to become a fiction writer?Every time I’m asked to explain my career choices, I start by trying to describe what often goes on in the mind of an immigrant kid—not just one who has been uprooted, but one who has had a sharp drop in class and wealth. I went from being part of a large family of well-respected doctors in Iran to living in a tiny apartment in a shabby neighborhood in Oklahoma with no father and no extended family around. Becoming a successful, independent Western woman was everything to me, and I spent those immigrant years working endlessly toward my goal of getting into an Ivy League college, where I studied economics and finance. I never bothered to ask myself if I was happy. Then I got into Harvard Business School. Those two years gave me so much knowledge and perspective to assess in myself the hunger and talent for something entirely different. I didn’t want money anymore. I wanted a voice in the world. I started writing, whenever I had a chance, and I’ve never looked back.